Nano coating prevents exploding batteries

November 21, 2016 | 00:00

Nano coating prevents exploding batteries

A company called Forge Nano claims to prevent thermal runaway in batteries by never letting it get started — even if the battery electrodes are shorted out. Forge Nano's nano coatings boost the breakdown temperature of flammable electrolyte Li-Ion batteries, putting it way far into the safe zone for nominal environmental usage. The key, according to Forge Nano (Denver) is nano-pattern atomic layer deposition (ALD).

As certain people on certain mobile phone design teams discovered the hard way: when you draw too much power from a Li-Ion battery it heats up the internal separator between the two flammable electrolytes, melting it and then igniting a chemical reaction between the electrolytes causing them to explode. Once their package ruptures the oxygen in the air catches the flammable electrolytes on fire which can spread quickly to other cells as they burst under the thermal runaway of heat as happened on a few Boeing 787 flights.

A company called Forge Nano claims to prevent this thermal runaway situation by never letting it get started — even if the battery electrodes are shorted out. Forge Nano's nano coatings boost the breakdown temperature of flammable electrolyte Li-Ion batteries, putting it way far into the safe zone for nominal environmental usage. The key, according to Forge Nano (Denver) is nano-pattern atomic layer deposition (ALD).

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratories confirm that ALD prevents surface phase transitions for high-voltage Lithium-Ion batteries. Nature magazine featured the ORNL's ALD work earlier this year. Since then Forge Nano has been working on a commercial version of the product that they finally believe they have in place soon (but sadly too late for Samsung Note 7).